calixipediafandomcom-20200214-history
The Temple
“Aah... the Temple... very auspicious, yes? Signifies that the God-Emperor Himself watches over you... that your mission is blessed by the Master of Mankind...” –Astropath Kinneth Reed, casting the Emperor’s Tarot At the very outskirts of the Great Warp Storms, closest to Port Wander (a short warp jump away), the station called the ‘Temple’ resides. The most unusual feature of the Temple are the multitudes of perfectly spherical rocks---several hundred meters in diameter---spin in many complex orbits around the star. The star itself is simply a dead cinder, a feebly glowing husk of dense matter. Nothing else exists in this oddly serene system: no gasses, no dust, and no planets. Nothing exists aside from the dead star and its family of perfectly round and seemingly artificial spheres---no dust, gas-streams, or worlds. 'Spherical Nodes' No one is certain who or what created the nearly perfect rock spheres that orbit the dead cinder of the Temple Station. Some speculate that the warp storms somehow shaped the rocks out of the remains of long lost planets that once inhabited the world. Others claim some elder god placed them here for some unknown reason, though few reasonable individuals put stock in such tales. Over the millennia, many expeditions have tried to explore these void rocks. Auspex scans reveal these spheroids to be nothing special; just ordinary rock, completely inert and unresponsive to all scans. However, no expedition has ever been able to drill more than a few centimeters into the stones before the mining equipment mysteriously failed. It is said that one Rogue Trader even tried to fracture a rock with lance-fire to no avail. Perhaps as a result, most voidmen claim that to interfere with the spheres brings ill-fortune and an untimely end. 'Temple - The Emperor's Tarot' The Temple’s name is associated with the Emperor’s Tarot of the Transubstantiates, a Sybillan derivative of the Emperor’s Tarot. The Temple signifies the commencement of a blessed endeavor, and voidfarers often hold up within the Temple station when the Maw begins to grow restless, rather than making the relatively short return trip to Port Wander. Some Rogue Traders even go out of their way to spend a day within the borders of the Temple station, regardless if a storm has swelled or not in the hopes of gaining some sort of blessing for their ventures. A superstitious few even go so far as to have their senior Astropaths (or some other psyker on board) conduct a casting of the Emperor’s Tarot just to see if the Temple card appears to them while they are within the boundaries of the Temple. Should this happen, then the captain considers his endeavor to be doubly blessed by the God-Emperor Himself. 'Using the Temple' The Temple has nothing of worth within it---its worth is its value as a Station of Passage. It provides an area of calm amongst the warp storms of the Halo Margins. More importantly, it is close enough to those same warp storms that Navigators can plot unusually accurate jumps when passing through the Maw. Any Navigator plotting a warp-trip through the Maw in the Temple gains a +10 bonus to all related tests. Passing into the inner regions of the Temple can be extremely dangerous, however. Most ships remain at least 1 AU from the star. Any closer, and the ship must pass through the orbits of the spheres. Should a vessel wish to do so, treat this like an asteroid field that requires a Difficult (–10) Pilot (Space Craft)+Manoeuvrability Test to navigate, rather than the usual Routine Test. Category:Systems Category:Koronus Expanse Category:The Maw